Queer thinking: Harris' movie takes

Burroughs scholar weighs in

WHEN ITALIAN moviemaker Luca Guadagnino was in need of some expert input as he prepared to film Queer, a lesser-known work in the Burroughs catalogue, who better to turn to than one of the world’s premier scholars, a man who has been pursuing the essence of the American novelist for over 40 years.

OLIVER HARRIS, long-time Professor of American Literature at the University of Keele in the UK and the author of an impressive sequence of books related to Burroughs including definitive edits of the core works, Queer among them, was a key individual Guadagnino turned to to support his production team.

As the New Year dawned, Harris spoke to Rock and the Beat Generation about his involvement in the project and his own response to a movie which has been attracting much positive feedback on its transatlantic release…

Simon Warner: How were you involved with the film project? What kind of expert knowledge were you able to share?

Oliver Harris: It must have been late 2022 or very early 2023 when I was first approached by the film’s researcher, Ben Panzeca, who asked if I could help out with background information about the writing of Queer. Pretty soon I was dealing with all sorts of people from the costume department to the film’s propmaster, giving advice – what brand of cigarette Burroughs smoked in Mexico City, the type of glasses he wore, down to the brand of pencil he used (yellow Venus number 2!).

I supplied them with manuscript facsimiles – some of which appear in the film’s opening shots – and photographs and many other details. Of course, I was flattered to be involved and agreed even before I’d really thought through all the issues. Or to put it another way, I might have been more cautious based on past experience.

I’m thinking of two films in particular. One is Gary Walkow’s Beat (2000), starring Courtney Love. I did a small amount of research for it, so I didn’t have very much skin in that game, and I wasn’t entirely surprised that, to put it diplomatically, the film wasn’t terribly good. But still, it might have been a reminder of how disappointing adaptions often are and how difficult it is to cast a Burroughs character: Keifer Sutherland just wasn’t right for it.

The other film is Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. I know the film has its admirers, and I’d always admired Cronenberg, seeing him as a very Burroughsian artist. He should have been the perfect director. But I hated the film. I mean, there are good things about it, including an excellent script, but Burroughs’ novel is fast and furious and disturbingly funny, whereas Cronenberg’s film is just slow and brown and morose.

It also has next to nothing to do with the original text and fabricated a kind of biopic fantasy that Burroughs must have hated, even though he was typically polite about it. So, looking back, I’m surprised I wasn’t more anxious about Queer.

But the more I did for the film as a consultant, the more I realised how little the issues were bothering me because they were getting the big calls right: meticulous historical research, really caring about knowing the facts, but not with a view to make a realist period drama that might be taken for a biopic – which would have been a major mistake. And then, in early February 2023, they shared the latest draft of the screenplay and I had my first meetings with Luca Guadagnino, Justin Kuritzkes, and Daniel Craig.

SW: How did that work out?

OH: I was star struck, to be honest, but they put me at my ease very quickly and the video conference we had was a lot of fun. I was also immediately impressed by their level of commitment: it was clearly very important to them that what they were doing made sense to me, that it had a kind of scholarly stamp of approval. More than that, they were genuinely interested in what I had to say. I could tell how much the project meant personally to Luca in particular.

Pictured above: Burroughs specialist Oliver Harris on the mic at a London preview of Queer last month, with director Luca Guadagnino, Daniel Craig and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes plus host Ellen Jones

It was also just great fun. Everyone laughed a lot. And all three of them – director, leading man, screenwriter – seemed really close. It was something I noticed again at the Q&A screening I did with them at the Regent Street Cinema just before Christmas last year, how warm they all were with each other. What I’m getting at is that, as well as taking the project seriously and wanting to do justice to Burroughs, there was a really nice vibe about it all.

Things were a little different when it came to the screenplay. Luca was keen to get my detailed response, and I sent back a dozen pages of notes, which included objections to the way it referenced the shooting of Joan Vollmer. I feared it might overshadow the film, just as Burroughs’ Introduction to the novella on its first publication in 1985 had done, when he famously drew the ‘appalling conclusion’ that killing his wife had determined his entire career as a writer. It’s a claim that may or may not be true, but which for me was a kind of red herring, because it had the effect of throwing everyone off the real story, which was the novella itself, which I see as the most revealingly political as well as the most nakedly personal text in the Burroughs oeuvre.

While there was much to like in the screenplay, I also didn’t really get how it understood the central relationship between William Lee and Eugene Allerton, and it wasn’t clear how Daniel Craig was going to play the role of Lee. So, while the vibe felt good, and the approach was really positive, the jury was still out at this point.

SW: I assume you have seen the film. What do you make of it as a work of art or as an interpretation?

OH: The short answer is: love at first sight! I saw it on the big screen at the Royal Festival Hall for its London premiere, and it just blew me away. It’s just so beautiful! The irony of course, is that this is the stamp of a Guadagnino film, ravishing good looks, and you wouldn’t normally associate Burroughs with aesthetic beauty. But this is the genius of the film. Guadagnino doesn’t try to imitate a Burroughsian style, any more than Daniel Craig tries to do an impersonation of Burroughs.

We might think that what we want in an adaptation is to get as close to the original as possible – but that’s not what we want. What we really look for in a homage is to bring something new to the original and to bring something out of the original that we’d not noticed before. That’s why I would compare Craig’s version of William Lee favourably to Peter Weller’s in Cronenberg’s film.

Weller was imitating a certain cool, dry image of Burroughs the cultural icon, but the result felt to me depthless and, frankly, quite dull. Craig, on the other hand, didn’t do a Burroughs impression at all. Instead, he gave an interpretation of William Lee, and it knocked me out because he had read between the lines and ellipses of the novella to reveal the physical, sensual, sexual side of Lee’s desire. I’ve written about Queer for three decades. I’ve re-edited it from the original manuscripts. I know the text off by heart. But I still hadn’t grasped before what Craig brought out of the character.

SW: Would William Burroughs have approved, do you think?

OH: Would he have approved? I don’t presume to get inside his head (I’m a scholar, not a biographer). I’d also point out that, while the film version is respectful and valid, the original is much darker because of the ugliness that comes out as Burroughs’ persona falls apart, being torn apart by desire, breaking down, along with the narrative.

So, while Daniel Craig’s performance is extraordinary, and perfect in many ways –especially in demolishing his own two-dimensional cool image as James Bond – it does fall short of the excruciating implosion of Lee in the novella.

And that collapse of his persona, its self-destruction, is key to the politics of the text, to Burroughs’ anatomy of power, where Lee finds himself in such a massively contradictory place, simultaneously at both the top and bottom of the food chain, both victim and victimiser: a privileged WASP abroad in Mexico and at the same time a despised gay junky, criminalised and demonised back in Cold War, McCarthyite America. There’s some of that politics and psychology in Guadagnino’s film, but his Lee isn’t really the hysterical Ugly American of Burroughs’ novella.

If I had to sum it up, the relation between film and text, I’d say that it is embodied very precisely in the way Guadagnino opens his Queer with the song ‘All Apologies’. Rather than use the Nirvana original, which has a harsh, hard, despairing beauty to it, he plays Sinéad O’Connor’s cover, which is not an imitation but a softly haunting beautiful tribute.

And, as a kind of displaced reference, this is also very much in the spirit of Burroughs’ own intertextual aesthetic: the choice of O’Connor’s version of Cobain’s song makes sense as a mise en abyme, by using a song that is one artist’s cover version of another artist’s original to introduce one artist’s…

Well, you get the idea, and it also helps us understand the film’s deliberate use of anachronistic songs rather than period music. Because what we hear and what we see are out of sync, we’re always reminded that this is an interpretation of Burroughs’ text and not an imitation or a reconstruction of the historical past.

SW: The style, the look of, the film has been much discussed. Italian director Luca Guadagnino, probably best known in the English-speaking world for his dark romantic drama A Bigger Splash in 2015, commissioned some remarkable sets at the famed Cinecitta Studios in Rome, recreating Mexico City in the 1950s. What did you feel about the atmosphere of the staging? Does it capture the spirit of Queer, does it distil the period, for you?

OH: I loved the look of the film, but it’s not just ravishing; it’s entirely appropriate to the text and to Burroughs’ work as a whole. The novella’s action took place largely in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City, where Burroughs lived, but far from trying to represent it in the historical manner of Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma, which faithfully reproduced the area as it appeared in the 1970s, Guadagnino not only recreated it on the backlots of Cinecittà Studios in Rome, Italy, but chose to play up rather than down the artifice by the additional use of models and mattes.

In this way, his Queer is more easily able to segue from scenes which seem entirely realistic into dreams, nightmares, uncanny moments and, in the final stages of the film, entirely non-realist abstract spaces that openly channel the surrealist cinema of David Lynch.

The film is actually pervaded by some very Burroughsian cryptic references, but the key point is that, very much like its use of ahistorical music, the look of the film insists on a non-realist approach to narrative, on an unstable hybrid aesthetic. In terms of Guadagnino’s style, you can see how it mashes up the gay romance story of Call Me By Your Name (2017) with the bizarre, creepy surrealist horror of Suspiria (2018).

The uncomfortable mix of incompatible genres is very Burroughsian, and the main reason why, for some critics, Guadagnino’s film seems to have an identity crisis. For me, it’s what makes it a great homage to Burroughs.

SW: With respect to the star of Queer, Daniel Craig agreeing to take on the central role – the Burroughs character in this semi-autobiographical tale – was a brave move. James Bond has become something of a definitive symbol of the solidity, the stability, of the Western world. We would not have expected to see previous 007s like Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan in versions of The Soft Machine or Exterminator! Having said that, actors are actors. Do you have any thoughts on Craig challenging those possible preconceptions?

OH: I’ve written about this at some length in my initial review of the film for the Burroughs website Reality Studio (https://realitystudio.org/criticism/not-everything-is-permitted/), so suffice to say here that I think the casting was risky but very, very clever. And the nominations Craig received are fully deserved. What a performance!

The pacing of the film has been criticised, but some of Craig’s long slow scenes are just remarkable, like when the camera remains fixed on his face while he shoots up, to the strains of New Order’s ‘Leave me Alone’. It’s deeply, deeply moving. It’s also, for me at least, quite unexpected.

Pictured above: Daniel Craig as Lee in Queer

In Burroughs’ novella, Lee is an over-the-top performer, channelling voices in the manic routines he tells Allerton, from a Texas wildcatter to a Tibetan Holy Man. For the film, I had imagined Craig might ham it up as he has done for the Benoit Blanc character in Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022). There is some of that theatricality in Queer, but mainly Craig gives the character emotional depth. His performance humanizes an otherwise repellent persona without falling into the trap of mythologising Burroughs.

SW: Queer, of course, is a novella with an uneven history, written in the 1950s it was not published until 1985. Is this an important piece in the Burroughs jigsaw or a minor throwaway?

OH: Yes, the novella exists in two time zones. But it isn’t just that the publishing context in 1985 was so radically different to when it was written in 1952, or that Burroughs’ own status had changed so much – from unknown, unpublished author to a countercultural icon and member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

The text itself when published was not at all as originally written. Mainly, that’s because the opening chapters, which fictionalised events in spring and summer 1951, had been cannibalised back in 1952 to add into Junky, so that, thirty years later, new material had to be added on, which was taken from unused parts of The Yage Letters that fictionalised events in 1953.

For most writers, such a messy material history might be a disaster, but it was the making of Burroughs, whose work embraces contingencies and accidents as one way to go beyond the straight jacket of linear narrative. This is one reason why the mismatch between what we see and what we hear works so well in Guadagnino’s film, and why it’s entirely appropriate that it ends up, after scenes of tripping on yagé, in a kind of abstract surrealist space.

As for the importance of Queer, I felt it the day I first read it, that this was far from the early autobiographical embarrassment Burroughs had always implied. Nor was it just a ‘missing piece’ in the jigsaw, transitional between the relatively straight Junky and the riotous disarray of Naked Lunch.

No, for me Queer didn’t fit in the Burroughs oeuvre; it changed the oeuvre. That’s why it was the key to The Secret of Fascination (2003), where I argued against the longstanding ‘junk paradigm’ of addiction in Burroughs’ work in favour of recognising the centrality of desire, the heart of darkness exposed in Queer.

SW: I don't think Burroughs' 1953 debut Junky has yet been filmed. Could the interest in and positive response to Queer trigger the possibility of that earlier story also being adapted for the big screen? Is there a Burroughs franchise or a multiverse on the way?!

OH: Oh, I do hope Junky gets filmed, I would love that! Queer is for me more fascinating than Junky because it’s so unstable, its tone somewhere between hysteria and horror; but Junky is great because it’s so sly and subtle, the narrative having that cold, deceptively simple deadpan noir style and yet constantly suggesting something unspeakable is going on. If anyone out there has plans and wants a Burroughs research consultant, I’m ready, sign me up!